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The American Literary Review has been published since 1990 through the Creative Writing Program of the Department of English at the University of North Texas.
 

American Literary Review

- Spring 2010 - Creative Nonfiction

Prom Date

Julie Marie Wade

First Prize: ALR 2009 Creative Nonfiction Contest
Final Judge: Bill Roorbach

    There's more than one answer to these questions, pointing in a crooked line...
                                        --Indigo Girls, "Closer to Fine"


TRUTH BE TOLD, I hadn't wanted to go to prom at all. Proms applied only to a particular social stratum--easy and elegant, the see-and-be-seen types--while I was a periscope-in-the-purse sort of girl, lurking around the corner with a deftly mirrored view.
     But the prom was important to my mother. She was always quick to remind me that beauty and brains weren't mutually exclusive; they went together, by her estimation, as readily as franks and beans, or ice cream and chocolate syrup.
    "Cindy Crawford was the valedictorian of her high school class," my mother often intoned. "You're the valedictorian of your high school class. Doesn't that mean anything to you?"
    "Michael Jordan didn't make his high school basketball team," I'd reply, one for one on the factually unverified anecdotes.
    "So? What does one have to do with the other?" Her brows arched, her temples pulsing.
    "I'm just saying that maybe--for some of us--it takes awhile to see our true potential."

    On the beauty front, I wasn't holding my breath. While my skin had cleared up and my glasses been relegated to evening reading time, there was still the matter of the atrocious perms, which my mother assured me were a "feature enhancement," girding my round face with the chlorine-tinted frizz of an electro-shocked sunflower. I stood tall and awkward in my odd body--too large in places, too small in others, stiff and wooden as a marionette in the hands of a novice puppeteer. I wore all the make-up my mother prescribed--Great Lash Mascara from Maybelline, 503A lipstick from Wet 'n' Wild--and daily, I smoothed my slick pores with powder from a Cover Girl compact, doing my best to "reduce the shine while maintaining the glow"--more contradictions I preferred to ignore than to challenge.
    There was a bright spot slowly emerging, though, like the fabled light at the end of the cavern, the looming conclusion of this tiresome spelunk through adolescence. My high school, in the last semester of my senior year, offered its inaugural creative writing class. The teacher, a laywoman with wide hips and ringed hands and a self-professed "mouth like a sailor" once the doors were closed and the nuns in the hallway out of earshot, began to express interest in my work. Mrs. McLaughlin had even taken me aside one day after class, sun trickling in through ancient windows and splattering the hall with light.
    "Promise me you're going to major in this in college," she said.
    "I didn't know you could. Creative writing? Isn't that more of a pleasure sport?"
    "Fuck all, Julie. Do your homework. It would be a damn shame if you didn't continue." She had small, blue eyes with huge, black pupils. They were always dilated, perhaps because she regarded the world so intently.
    "I'm supposed to be a doctor," I explained. "I've convinced them now that I'll get a Ph.D. in psychology, that it'll be almost as good as an M.D. in something else. But I think a writing major might be pushing my luck."
    "So do a double major. Do whatever you have to do as long as you keep doing this." She slapped the stack of papers in her hand. "I'm fucking serious."
I smiled then. "Me, too."

    Meanwhile, my mother expressed her concern that I had not made any male friends since the previous year, severely limiting my options for prom. Since I attended an all-girls school, every formal event was a de facto tolo, with dates necessarily imported from an extracurricular population. "It's almost ten months later, and we're back in the same boat," she said, jabbing at the calendar with her blue ballpoint. "See? We're here. March. The prom is here"--flipping ahead two pages--"May. Do you want a repeat of last year?"

No. I emphatically did not want a repeat of last year.

For the junior prom, my mother had taken it upon herself to procure me a date.
    "You've been uncooperative and reticent, so I had to spearhead this campaign," she announced, likening my social life to that of a politician on the brink of impeachment.
    My mother worked as a teller at Seafirst bank, where she waited on the wife of a Korean missionary from church. Mona Lee's son, Scott, was a first-year student at the Lutheran Bible Institute, a devout Christian and a champion soccer player. He had also taken the vow of chastity until marriage at a local abstinence extravaganza and wore the virginity ring on his left hand to prove it.
    "Mona told Scott that you'll be asking him to accompany you to your prom next Sunday before service. We'll make sure to get there ten minutes early."
    "Which one is Scott?" I asked, standing at the entrance to the sanctuary while the organist performed a prelude rendition of "Lift High the Cross."
    "Take a wild guess," my mother snapped, gesturing toward the lone Asian rose in our congregation of pale Scandinavian calla lilies.
Scott was sitting down as I approached him, but he turned when he sensed my presence, or perhaps my unwilling perfume. "Julie?"
    "Yes. Hi." I perched tentatively beside him and shook his hand. "So--prom. Three weeks from Saturday."
    "It would be an honor to escort you," he grinned.
    "Ok."
    "And we should go to the mall and rent my tuxedo together," he suggested, feigning spontaneity. "I want my cummerbund to match your dress."
    "Ok."
    "I will get your phone number from my mother and call you to set up a time."
    "Great." I nodded. "I guess that just about covers it."
    I stood up, and he stood also, and I gaped in horror at the difference in our height--at least a solid eight inches.
    "Is something wrong?" Scott inquired, straightening his tie and brushing lint from his sport coat. Was he oblivious? Was he insane? Had the chastity vow permanently warped his brain?
    "No," I sighed. "Everything's fine." And just like that, I had a prom date.

    "Whatever happens, I'm not asking Scott Lee to senior prom. I want to make that absolutely clear," I told my mother.
    "There is nothing wrong with Scott Lee," she replied. "I think you can do better--I know you can do taller--but he's a perfectly fine young man of the best moral fiber I could imagine."
    Yes, it was true. He had told me over dinner at the Alki Homestead the entire history of his coming to Christ and the evolution of his moral code. Over poached salmon and baked potatoes, he sermonized the need for religious tenacity in a world bereft of values. "For instance, I don't watch Disney movies," he professed proudly.
    "Because they're made for small children?"
    "Because they're filth, that's why," he explained, his expression hardening.    
    "And no child of mine would ever be allowed to watch them." He considered my face as if we were discussing the fate of our future child.
    "That's a shame," I replied, scraping my fork deliberately across my plate. "I really liked The Little Mermaid. I bought it the day it came out. I'm planning to plop my kids down with that one just as soon as they're old enough to sit up."
    "Not me." Here his tone rose to project the superiority of his position, even as his gold and black braided bow tie twittered comically against his Adam's apple. "I won't watch a film that contains profanity, nudity, or any insinuation of adultery or fornication."
    "What does that leave?"
    "Soccer," he said. "I watch a lot of soccer. And of course, we're fortunate that nowadays many church services are broadcast on television."

    My mother sat at the kitchen table, making a list of potential prom dates. I watched her hand hovering in mid-air, debating whether or not to write something down. "You know, Scott Lee does have a brother. Two, I think. One might even be in your grade."
    "Off limits," I said. "The entire Lee family is off limits."
    "I didn't want to say this," my mother sighed, which was her way of communicating that she had been saving the forthcoming remark for just the right moment. "It seems to me you're being rather shallow."
    "Me?!" I laughed aloud at the absurdity. "I'm being shallow?! I'd be perfectly happy spending prom night at the library!"
    "Studious alibi aside...you're turning up your nose at Scott Lee, and anyone related to him, because you're embarrassed to be seen with a young man who's shorter than you are. Perhaps you're prejudiced against Asians--you with your liberal, enlightened ideas." Her last three words leapt up like oil from a frying pan.
I knew this strategy. I was quite familiar. She planned to fire my temper, then guilt me into submission.
    "Not Asians, Mother--Christians. Very short, very know-it-all Christians."

    After dinner, Scott and I didn't say much to each other the rest of the night. I let him pay because I figured I was paying in my own way, and if he wanted a refund, he should ask my mother for it. Then, he drove us to the Daughters of the American Revolution mansion on Capitol Hill, where we parked on a cobbled residential street with a tree growing out of the road.
    "Dangerous," he remarked, and rested his clammy hand against the exposed skin of my back.
    Inside, I tried to pretend I didn't notice the eyes of my peers popping out of their heads like insects. I tried to pretend I wasn't bothered by the photographer asking me to "squat down" beside my date. "Your dress," he said. "It has a very wide skirt. No one will be able to tell your knees are bent." Scott slid his arm around my waist and smiled.
    When we danced, I looked down and counted the pieces of red and white confetti floating across the floor. My neck hurt from holding it at such an awkward angle against his shoulder, and my back throbbed from several hours bent over at the waist, longing for the DJ's voice to croon into the microphone "last song."

    As we walked to Scott's car, he took my hand in his, and I did my best not to recoil. "Julie, I have a serious question for you," he murmured, stroking my thumb with the steady beat of a metronome.
    I figured he was going to ask if we could do this again sometime; if I would give him another chance; if I was lonely, like he was. Instead: "I get the sense there's a lot of tension in your life," he observed, "and I wondered if it might not be because"--the tree and the ruptured walkway coming into sight--"if it might not be because things aren't quite right between you and the Lord."
Nothing but the screeching tires of my mind followed by the palpable stench of burnt rubber.
    "I know it's presumptuous, but if you'd like me to pray with you, it would be my great pleasure."
    I curled my toes and released them, clenched my one free fist and released it, bit my lip until I tasted blood. Was he oblivious? Was he insane? Had the chastity vow permanently warped his brain? "That's ok," I mustered finally. "I--I decline."
    "Well, the offer doesn't expire," he promised. "It doesn't have to be tonight. I would be willing to pray with you anytime, and I will pray for you." Scott opened the passenger door and lifted the electric seatbelt over my head. Once he started the engine, it would snap across my chest and seal me tight--just like a chastity belt, I thought, with a wry smile.
    The surprise came, however, when Scott reached his arm back in what I assumed was the standard, masculine gesture for "putting it in reverse." The whole body is involved, the left hand guiding the steering wheel while the right arm, chest, and shoulder direct the car's backward motion. My knees were turned toward my door, buried under the golden bulk of my gown, my head leaning back in relief. That's when he pulled me toward him--suddenly, a whiplash motion--and forced the wet heft of his tongue into my mouth. I sputtered in disbelief as his fingers pinched my chin, as his breath poured into me like a CPR dummy. "I've been waiting all night to do that," he grinned, then steered the blue stick-shift away from the curb and across the city in self-congratulatory silence.

    Now it was story time. My mother had made tea and invited me--a mandatory invitation--to sit with her while she drank it.
    "You know, I went to my prom with a handicapped boy," she began. He probably had a hang nail, I thought, or a low-income family. I had no way to be certain this story was true, but doubting her wouldn't make the time pass faster.
    "He wasn't always handicapped," she continued. "He used to be an excellent athlete, showed a great deal of promise. But he slipped getting into the bathtub and injured his spine. A permanent injury. There was nothing they could do. He knew, at seventeen, that he would be wheelchair-bound for life."
While this story reeked of Lifetime movie or after-school special, I imagined the boy, pictured his face, the resignation written there, the sad roulette of fortune. I allowed myself to believe that he was real.
    "So he asked you to prom?" I prompted.
    "Yes. We had gone to a number of less important dances together, and he was afraid to ask me, afraid I would only say yes out of pity."
    "Did you?"
    "Yes," she said, squeezing her tea bag over her cup, then squashing it under her spoon. "But he didn't know that. And I really did like him. I hope he found a good desk job and a patient wife."
    "Do you still have the pictures?"
    "Somewhere," she sighed with a wave of her hand, turning now to the paper.
    "I have everything, somewhere."

    At school, Mrs. McLaughlin assigns us a collaborative journal project. This seems like an oxymoron to me, since journals are meant to be private. "Think of it more as a correspondence," she says. "You will be exchanging thoughts and observations with another member of the class, drawn at random. Occasionally, I'll read your exchanges and add another voice to your conversation."
My assigned partner is Pauline Gates, a sophomore with an advanced vocabulary and a juvenile fetish for R.L. Stine books. I sense the other students regard her with suspicion, watch as they avoid her in the halls. Unlike me, she has not mastered the art of blending in, of keeping quiet during large-group discussion. She sees every suggestion box and "Are there any questions?" as a forum to present her latest manifesto. When she speaks, the other girls roll their eyes, yawn; sometimes they pelt her with paperclips and rubber bands.

Dear Julie,
I think this journal activity sounds superb! I especially appreciate Mrs. McLaughlin's suggestion that we make it epistolary in nature--writing directly to each other. As a child, I often kept my diaries as a series of letters. I named my diary Louise, so I could write in exasperation, "Geez, Louise, you'll never believe what happened!" So what's your story? I always notice you in class and your moody blue eyes. You always look sleepy or very far away. Where are you while the rest of us are here?
Warm regards,
Pauline Gates

For several days, the journal sits in my locker. There is no deadline for responses. Mrs. McLaughlin simply said we should write when we had something to say, something we wanted to share. I keep my own journal for when I have something to say, but confiding in a classmate seems a treacherous enterprise. Finally, I write:

Hi Pauline,
I guess I look sleepy because I have piano lessons very early in the morning. What about you? Do you like music?
Sincerely,
Julie

Imagine my surprise when, several periods after submitting the journal to our drop box in the yearbook office, Pauline appears at my locker, journal in hand, blond head shaking. "You're going to have to do better than this," she says, smiling, her manner overly familiar, her retainer clicking against her teeth.
    "What do you mean?"
    "I already have a pen pal. Her name is Susan, and she lives in Minnesota, and we exchange letters that are about this boring on a weekly basis."
I stare at her, a short, plump girl in mint green stretch pants and an oversized white t-shirt. I wait, but no words slide down the chute from my mind to my mouth.
    "You can trust me," she says, leaning in close enough that I can inspect the Morse code of freckles dappling her nose and cheeks. Instinctively, I step away.
    "I don't have much to say right now," I tell her. "I guess I am kind of boring."
Pauline blocks my path when I attempt to move, wielding her bright orange binder like a road work SLOW! sign. "Don't misunderstand me. I didn't say you were boring. I said your entry was." She hands the journal back to me. "You can do better. I'll be waiting."

    At home, my mother flutters around me, giddy with excitement. "I've had a breakthrough," she says.
    "Better than a breakdown," I murmur under my breath, unloading the contents of my backpack onto my bed.
    "You've heard of the Make a Wish Foundation?"
    "For sick kids...sure."
    "Well, many children meet celebrities through Make a Wish. Sometimes they go to ballgames or movies or out for burgers with their favorite stars. It's good for the celebrities' PR, so their managers are only too willing to arrange it."
I look at her, waiting for the point. "And?"
    "Why don't you invite a celebrity to your senior prom?"
    "Mom! I'm not a kid, and I don't have terminal cancer!"
    "Did I say anything about using the Make a Wish foundation? No. It was only that the Make a Wish Foundation inspired this idea. You could write a fan letter. You're good at that. But you only have two months, so you'll have to act fast." She hands me a sheet of scented stationery and a matching envelope.        
    "Immediately, in fact."
    "Mom, this is crazy. Who am I going to ask? Who's going to take that kind of letter seriously?"
    She beamed at me in her best Cheshire way. "Alex Rodriguez, from the Seattle Mariners."
    "The rookie?"
    "Exactly. He's young, he's good-looking, he's going to be hugely wealthy, and you never know--stranger things have happened."
    "Stranger than what?"
    "Well, if you two hit it off..." She smiled suggestively, opening and closing her palms. "You'd be set for life--your very own Cinderella story."

    I had never cared much about baseball, certainly not watching it on television. But in 1995, the spring of my sophomore year, the Mariners catapulted from local interest to national craze, winning the World Series and waving their ubiquitous banners, "Refuse to Lose." From following the play-offs with my parents, I learned the names of the players, their respective positions, and an assortment of odd facts about their lives. Even as baseball fever had abated over the past two years, the Mariners of 1995 were forever canonized; we regarded them, collectively, as the saints of our city.
    "Here's an article about Alex Rodriguez," my mother said, handing me an L-shaped cut-out from The Seattle Times. "Maryann Erickson has a friend who works for the Mariners, so she's going to provide us with the address. That only leaves the letter for you to write, and then of course we'll need to send a picture. Let's look through the album and find your very best one. Dad can take the negative to Bartell's tomorrow and have them print a copy."
    "Why do we need a picture?" I asked.
    "Well, it's nice if he'll do it--and it wouldn't hurt his image. But we want to make sure he knows this isn't charity." She pinched my chin. "You are not a charity case."

Hi Pauline,
My mother wants me to ask a Seattle Mariner to the prom. I'm not sure if that's interesting, but it's what I've got to work with. She thinks I should ask Alex Rodriguez, but I think that might be shooting a little high. If I'm going to ask anyone, it needs to be a more peripheral player--someone constant, dependable, but not the star of the team or the beacon of its newest hopes and dreams. I'm thinking of asking second baseman Joey Cora. Any thoughts?
--Julie

The following morning, Pauline Gates was leaning against my locker when I emerged from Spanish class. I turned to walk the other way, but she shouted my name down the corridor, singling me out, making my face flush instantly and my body spin around in submission.
    "This is painful," she said, patting the journal against her palm. "Painful and appalling."
    "Maybe," I said, "but it's just how things are."
    "Do you want to go to prom?"
    Pauline's question stopped me like a touch in freeze tag. No one had ever asked me that question before; no one had ever bothered to inquire. Stymied, I shrugged. "I'm not sure. I honestly have no idea what I want."
    "That's what people say when they think they can't have what they want."
    "Are you a Christian, Pauline?" I asked suddenly.
    "Agnostic," she said. "With Unitarian tendencies."
    So she was emerging in this story as a very short, very know-it-all agnostic.

    "Well, I have class..." quickly switching my books and retreating toward Sister Mary Annette's English class.
    "Meet me after school in the chapel," Pauline instructed. It was not a question.
    "We can talk more about this then."

    The chapel at Holy Names Academy was a miniature replica of the Sistine Chapel, hand-painted generations before by a sister of the Holy Names of Jesus and Mary. Around the curved altar, with its dome like a soft-boiled egg, pink-tinted and smooth-textured, this anonymous woman had emblazoned an intricate pattern of gold. "She never used a stencil," my theology teacher alleged.
    "A true artist, she understood about proportion. Legend has it she was ambidextrous and painted the pattern with both hands at once."
Another legend concerned the fragment of rope still dangling from the ceiling's crown. "A priest killed himself there," a girl once whispered to me in mass.
    "Why?"
    "He was in love," she said, "and distraught."
    "I can see that."
    "Tell her the rest," another girl intoned. "He was in love, and distraught, over a man."

I am not surprised that Pauline is there already, waiting for me, stretched out flat on a pew with her head propped against her Jansport, browsing the pages of an unfamiliar book.
    "Why did you come to an all-girls school?" she asks the moment she sees me, moving cautiously around the confessionals and sinking slowly onto the floor.    
    "There's plenty of room here," Pauline says, patting the wood of her pew.
    "No, it's ok. I'm not feeling particularly penitent--" and I watch her face light up at the word. "I'd rather just sprawl in the aisle."
    "Sacrilege!" Pauline smiles, raising her arm like a spear. "So--why an all-girls school?"
    "My parents said it would be a better education. They wanted me to infiltrate the Catholic system, steal some learning from their rivals."
    "So you're Protestant?"
    "I'm--uncommitted right now, I'd say."
    Pauline unmoors herself from the pew, where she had looked comfortable, all settled in, and comes to sit beside me on the floor--a little too close, a little too earnest. "Do you like the fact that it's an all-girls school?"
    "It's harder to get a prom date, that's for sure," I quip.
    "Why do you deflect my questions? Am I making you nervous?"
    She is. "No." Pausing: "Why did you come to an all-girls school?"
    "So glad you asked!" Pauline unfolds her legs, and I notice she wears shoes like a woman four times her age, granny sandals with cumbersome straps and thick, reinforced heels. "I read about this commune once--somewhere in Florida, or South Carolina--and it's only women who live there. They cook together, they quilt, they make art and music and poetry, and they live, self-sufficiently, off the land. Isn't that incredible? Just women together--no men, no children even."
    "No proms I take it?"
    "You're doing it again," and lays a moist, doughy hand on my wrist. "Wow," she says. "You really have beautiful hands."

    At home, my mother doesn't have to remind me to write the letter. I head to my room straightaway and sit down at the glossy white desk with its matching white chair and pink satin cushion. Everything looks formal in my surroundings, formal and feminine--lacy curtains at the windowsill, ballerina memorabilia, a collection of dolls from around the world, each one contained in her original packaging.

Dear Mr. Cora,
My name is Julie Wade, and I live in the suburbs of Seattle. I attend an all-girls Catholic high school on Capitol Hill. This year I'll be graduating, and I would like very much to attend my senior prom. The event will take place at the Seattle Space Needle on May 26th at 7 o'clock in the evening. I have seen the Space Needle many times in the distance, but I have never yet set foot inside.
I am writing to ask if you would do me the honor of attending my prom with me. I don't know any young men to ask, and you are my favorite player on the Seattle Mariners. You never hog the spotlight, but you're always there--working hard for the team, making a consistent difference. That is the kind of person I hope to be in my own future career.
Thank you for considering this request. You can reach me as specified below.
Yours truly,

Julie

    "I still think you should have asked A-Rod," my mother sighed, studying my letter again before folding it into thirds and tucking the point of the envelope under its cream-colored lip.
    "Trust me, Mom, my chances are better with Joey Cora."
    "And the picture? Which did you choose?" We both knew this matter of choice was for show--a pantomime that my selection would stand against her own.
    "I thought this one--it seemed the most like me, the most you can capture on film."
    "You're wearing jeans! And sneakers! And a baseball cap!"
    "Well, he does play baseball..." I offered.
    "This is what I mean, Julie. Common sense. Were you born without it, or have you lost it along the way? When are you going to understand that the last girl to look good in jeans and sneakers and a baseball cap was Ann-Margret in Bye, Bye, Birdie?"
    "It seemed nice to me--not pretentious, not trying too hard."
    "Bill, get in here!" She called for my father as she placed another picture beside the one I had chosen. "Bill, which of these pictures do you like best? Now, be objective."
    He bent over the table, peering at the first picture--of me on the front porch on my way to a Mariners game; at the second picture--of me on the terrace in a fitted white dress, clutching my clutch purse a little too tight, anticipating a night with my parents at the Pacific Northwest Ballet.
    I remembered that night so clearly, like a lucid dream that lasts long into the morning, well past breakfast and into first period. We sat in the balcony at the Opera House, my parents and I, and all around us I admired the grandeur of the place, the red brocade curtains minced with gold. My mother poured over her program, paying close attention to the Principal Dancers, one of whom was a blond and chiseled man named Brent Davies.
    "Look at him," she whispered. "He's gorgeous. If you play your cards right, you could have a man like that."
    Later, when he stepped onto the stage in his transparent tights, I blushed at what seemed such a conspicuous bulge, there below the waist where his courtier's vest cut away. I felt I shouldn't be watching; he looked so exposed. My mother nudged me, her elbow nesting deep in my ribs. "That's him! Do you see him?"
    "Yes, Mom."
    "Isn't he dreamy? Wouldn't you love him to lift you up like that--as if you were light as a feather?"
    "I think she actually is," I observed, gesturing to the rope of a woman he had tossed into the air, her long legs parting in instant arabesque.
    My mother had wanted us to swoon together, to share the same enthusiasm she had performed there, and would perform again at every subsequent ballet. I didn't believe my mother--not really. I didn't believe Brent Davies sent "shivers down her spine" or caused her "heart to skip a beat" as she claimed he did. Rather, I thought she was trying too hard, exaggerating her own reaction to model for me what mine should be. And if I didn't "feel it"--whatever it was--I knew I was supposed to "fake it"--whatever it was. That much I understood. I was supposed to pretend that watching Brent Davies inspired in me some miraculous shift in body chemistry, some deep, visceral longing. I kept waiting, but I couldn't feel it--for him, for anyone. I had never felt it in any context my mother ordained.

    "Both of these pictures are nice," my father remarked. "I think you'd be just fine sending either one."
    "Bill! You're a man. If a young woman asked you to a dance, and you had never met her--only had a picture of her to go by--which of these pictures is going to win you over, the one where she looks like riffraff or the one where she's actually put some effort into making herself presentable?"
    "Well, then, the second one, I suppose." He glanced at me, and I thought I glimpsed an apology in his gray-blue eyes.
    "All right. That settles it! Bill, tomorrow you will take this negative and get a copy made. To be safe, why don't you make a couple? Then, we'll put it in the mail Wednesday morning, and you'll have your prom date to order."

I picked up the journal before first period, before I had even stopped by my locker. Pauline's note was enigmatic: See present, she wrote. It will explain everything.
    "Secret admirer?" someone asked, brushing past me in the hall. When I got closer to the tall row of wooden cupboards, I saw my combination lock adorned with crepe paper--several crimped, pastel snakes--and on the floor, the paper was threaded through the woven handles of a gift bag, my name sketched on it in pseudo-calligraphy. I grabbed the bag quickly and disappeared into a bathroom stall.
    Inside I found two shrink-wrapped CDs of The Indigo Girls. I stared blankly at the unfamiliar covers, the compelling name. A Post-it note added this cryptic equation: Amy + Emily =Pauline + Julie. She had also included, beneath a tissue paper shroud, the same book I had seen her reading the day before. It was a collection about angels and psychic powers, heavily highlighted, filled with her notes and marginal commentary. Pauline had inscribed it to me: I think the best gift is the gift of a book. Don't you agree? We are kindred spirits--angels-to-be.
    "Julie, are you in here?" She stopped in front of my stall, recognized my shoes. "I see you got the present. What do you think?"
    "It's nice, but--" unlatching the door--"you really don't know me that well."
    "On the contrary, I think I know you very well. I think it's kismet we were assigned to be journal partners."
    I stand at the sink, washing my hands, Pauline looming in the mirror behind me. It is hard to meet her eyes. "This is starting to freak me out a little," I say at last.
    "What is?" That intensity, that leaning too close.
    "This. This whole--dynamic."
    "But you feel it, don't you?"
    "Well, I feel something..."
    "Don't fight it. People always try to fight it. We don't have to. We can break the cycle."
    "What cycle?! What are you talking about?!"
    "You're not like the other girls here," Pauline coos. It has the ring of a bad pick-up line, the vibe of a campy horror film where any moment, she'll transform into a three-headed monster dripping with slime.
    "I have to go."
    "No, you don't."
    "Really," I say, holding up my hand, the fingers spread. "I do."

    Mrs. McLaughlin is scanning photographs when I tap on the window of the yearbook office. She motions for me to come inside. "This is unexpected," she smiles. "Take a load off," and gestures to one of the many, graffitied chairs.
    "I need to ask you a favor," I say.
    "Letter of recommendation? Say no more. I've got you covered."
    "Thanks," I blush, "but that's not it. I wanted to know if you could shuffle the journal partners, mix things up, you know."
    "Ah," she nods. "Pauline's getting to you."
    "I wouldn't say that. I just--I think it would be good for all of us to correspond with different people."
    She winks at me. "You're very diplomatic, aren't you?"
    I shrug. "Maybe."
    "It was a rhetorical question. I know you are. And I know Pauline's a handful. She's really smart, and I see a lot of myself in her at that age--" I must have looked startled because she bends toward me and confides, in a softer voice--"yeah, it's true, people can change." Mrs. McLaughlin stands, stretches, so at ease in her own skin. "There are some boundary issues there, a lot of loneliness. What can I say, Julie? This life does a fucking number on us, doesn't it?"
    I nod, never having heard it put quite that way.
    "Don't worry," she says. "I'll take care of it. But--you'll have to do a favor for me."
    I look back over my shoulder nervously. "What's that?"
    "What do you think? Get a fucking writing degree; do what you love."

    I didn't make it to my senior prom, which I can't say is very surprising. My mother wept, and my father took her out to dinner. I laid on my bed, listening to the Indigo Girls. One song in particular--like a coda for something about to be over, like a blessing for something about to begin.
    I thought of our freshman dance at the Seattle Aquarium, of Anna Shope in her tight, pewter dress--shimmery and velveteen both at once--and of the boy's hands on her hips, so happy to have found someplace to land. They were swaying to the music, like creatures under the sea, and I couldn't take my eyes off her. Overhead, the blue light of the water, the sharks' finned shadows as they circled and passed. My own date, no less and no more--only a body beside me.
    I thought of Sara Timmons and Heather Graham, of walking in on them in the bathroom, their own kind of dance.
    "It's ok," Sara said, waving to me, her lips blubbed from kissing, her hair wild.
    "We're gay, not shy."
    "Oh," I said. And I lingered a little too long in the doorway, watching her untie Heather's tie. What other prerequisites were there? I wondered. What if I was, after all-- a little bit shy?
    Colleen Harris wanted to go to prom so badly she didn't care that she didn't have a date. She bought a life-sized Superman from a comic book store, got her hair done, made a grand entrance. This was our junior prom, and as I contorted my body to match my date's infinitesimal torso, I watched her, waltzing with Superman, her friends grinning, even her non-friends grinning. She looked like she was having a good time. In that moment, I think I envied her most of all.

    Pauline Gates continued to write me letters. She sent them to my parents' address, and each week when I came home from college, there they were in a tidy pile. Eventually, she left Holy Names to attend an alternative school. The last I heard she was choreographing an elaborate ballet--to Bonnie Tyler's "Total Eclipse of the Heart."
    Julie, she wrote, it's all a trap. We don't need these institutions--college, church, marriage. We can escape it all; we can transcend it. Someday you'll come to your senses.
    Mrs. McLaughlin left Holy Names, too. She fell in love there, with another woman--a younger teacher with whom she shared a four-year love affair. Their romance had begun to blossom during my senior year, despite the nuns, despite her three children and her husband and the life she had intended to live.
They stayed together--she and her lover--and they went on to teach at a different school, one that didn't discriminate, a place that was happy to have them. When she wrote me, years later, after reading a literary journal that referenced my name, we had to begin to know each other all over again. No longer "Mrs. McLaughlin," I had to learn to call her "Sally."
    So glad to read you kept your end of the bargain! she effused. I hope you're still as diplomatic as you ever were, but far less lonely.
    I wrote and told her it was so.

    The most surprising of these outcomes, however, came about on an inauspicious afternoon. I had come home from college, enjoying that rare hour of solitude before my mother returned from the store, resumed her inquisition. I heard the mailman arrive at the door, the sound of the red flap slapping shut, his footsteps diminishing to a faint scrape down the walk.
    Among the bills and coupon books I found a lean letter, business-sized and opaque, with only the letters JC scrawled in the upper-left-hand corner. The thin envelope was addressed to me.
    Carefully, I tore it open. There was a sense of wanting to preserve the suspense, so I moved slowly, unsure of what I would find.
The letter was typed on a piece of ordinary white paper. No letterhead, no fancy insignia. It read:

Dear Julie,
Thank you for your correspondence of last year. I receive many letters, and though I do read them, it often takes me many months to respond.
While I was home in Puerto Rico during the off-season, I read your letter about the prom. I'm sorry that I was not able to escort you. I hope that you celebrated somehow the accomplishment of your graduation.
I wish you all good things in the years to come. Always believe in yourself, and remember where true beauty comes from.
--Joey Cora

    It was perhaps the best letter of my life. I read it again--simple, direct, compassionate. My nose bristled in anticipation of tears. Then, I heard my mother's key in the lock and, knowing I would soon be summoned to help, I slipped the letter, a secret worth keeping, deep in my dark denim pocket.

 

JULIE MARIE WADE is a doctoral student and graduate teaching fellow in the Humanities Department at the University of Louisville. Her first collection of lyric essays, Wishbone: A Memoir in Fractures, is forthcoming from Colgate University Press in 2010. Her second collection of lyric essays, In Lieu of Flowers, is forthcoming from Sarabande Books in 2011. Her first poetry chapbook Without is forthcoming from Finishing Line Press in 2010 as part of the New Women's Voices Chapbook Series. She has also received the Chicago Literary Award in Poetry, the Gulf Coast Nonfiction Prize, the Oscar Wilde Poetry Prize, the Literal Latte Nonfiction Award, and the AWP Intro Journals Award in Nonfiction.